33

Boy, oh boy, has the last week continued to be rough on me. I think I'm suffering from a bit of that "antepartum depression" I've read about. Or maybe there's just been a major shift in hormones. But I have been a sad, sniffling mess. Not the kind of mess that cries during the intro of Grey's Anatomy because of the moving music. And not the kind of mess that throws a tantrum when Fred Meyer is out of my favorite brand of conversation hearts (Brach's, not Sweehearts). But the kind of mess whose mind wanders off into the dark clouds, whose heart feels heavy, and who heaves big sobs during a hot shower just because she feels inconsolably sad, alone, and broken. So inconsolable that going to work is not even an option.

I know, I know, where's the tiny violin. Life is good. I have a job in a field I love, a fabulous new home, a healthy pregnancy, and a no-less-than-perfect husband who waits on me hand and foot. But that's not really what depression is about. Truth is, knowing I have all these things to be grateful for only contributes to my self-loathing for feeling less than ecstatic about my life.

No one thing appears to be the trigger for this low of lows. Although I know that reading Motherless Mothers contributes to my feelings of sorrow. It makes me think about what I had, and what I don't have anymore. It makes me think about having a daughter, and the chance of not being there for her. It makes me wonder why no one took me under their wing after my mom died. Like everyone paid attention and empathized with me for a while, but then I was supposed to be grown enough to deal on my own. But is any woman ever really grown enough to enjoy life without a mother? Let alone at 19 years old? And how about at this significant transition in a woman's life?

I heave a sob when I think about how alone in this world I feel. And another one because I know people do indeed love me, but that it's not always enough. I sob when I think of how the one person who is supposed to know me and love me most, left me. And I sob harder when I think I could be setting up the same landscape for my own daughter. I sob because my mom never wrote me a note or life instructions to read as I grew up. I sob because I wonder if that means she didn't love me enough. I sob because she really was such a great mother. And I sob because I think about how fantastic she would have been as a grandmother.

I fantasize about what our relationship would be like today, more than 10 years after her death. I imagine we would be close, and that she would have been an intricate part of this process with me. Maybe not in the "come to the OB with me," but more in the "hey, I've been feeling this way, did you ever experience that with any of your pregnancies?" I fantasize about what role she might play in the actual childbirth process. I imagine that I would have wanted her at the hospital the whole time, just in case, but that the delivery room itself would have continued to be just the Alex and Jo Show. I envy my friends, pregnant celebrities, fictional TV characters, about their maternal relationships during this time. Which in itself is interesting, since only about 15% of women with living mothers even include them in their birth experience. But for those of us left without the options, we have only our fantasy versions of our mothers to rely on.

I've been wanting Alex to read this book, so he can perhaps understand my intermittent sorrow a bit better. Motherless Mothers has been making quite the impact on me the last few days. It very obviously resonates with me, in a way I hadn't anticipated pre-pregnancy. I have been highlighting the portions that speak to me, and am re-typing them here, for posterity. And because the author, Hope Edelman, writes with so much more clarity than I am able to:

"I hadn't anticipated the existential aloneness I felt during the postpartum period ... Once I became a mother, my own mother was suddenly nowhere and everywhere all at once."

"Loss - real and imagined - is a part of a motherless mother's landscape in a way that most friends, husbands and coworkers can't understand."

"'Being a good mother' ranks high among most motherless mothers' goals - to be the mothers they didn't get to have, and to be the mothers their mothers didn't get the chance to become."

"Sometimes I suspect I'm longing more for a mother than my mother, for the archetypal wise woman who would swoop into my household at exactly the right moment, bearing a scrubber sponge in one hand and a tube of diaper cream in the other. 'Go lie down,' she would say. 'I've got everything under control. And when you wake up, I'll show you how to do it all.'"

"Many women interviewed for this book spoke of motherhood as an experience that restored their equilibrium, their self-esteem, or their faith."

"So many motherless daughters report having intense grief episodes after the births of their first children. You can't mourn as a motherless mother until you are a motherless mother."

"Most psychologists agree that the mother-child bond is the most primal and essential bond a human can experience, and its loss is one of the most emotionally painful events a child can endure."

"When someone does pay attention to the small details of her welfare, a child absorbs the message that all her needs are important and, by extension, that she is valued and that she matters."

"Even as a woman recognizes what is to be gained by a birth, she is also aware that fundamental pieces of her identity will soon be lost."

"For motherless women, a first pregnancy is mainly a psychoemotional experience. She is preparing to assume the role that has previously absence and loss ... Of all the trigger events a motherless daughter will encounter in her lifelong passage through mourning, a first pregnancy and birth top the list."

"Seeing other other women with their mothers ... causing her to feel unhinged from a maternal connection at the exact moment her own entry into motherhood was about to be confirmed."

"I'd prided myself on being a survivor, on taking care of myself in times of extreme distress. I was far less adept at letting others take care of me, though that was often what I craved most."

"I thought during my first first pregnancy, my mother was the one who would have been most interested in this child's development and in my pregnant self, the one who would have called in the middle of a day just to see if I was feeling tired."

"This mother of my fantasy was all-knowing and constantly available, with encyclopedic information about pregnancy and birth and with one hand perennially resting on the phone. Pure fantasy? Maybe. Maybe not."

"Two-third of women with mothers in the control group survey report they did receive emotional support during pregnancy and after birth."

"... the person who's known you longest, and the best. It's so easy to idealize. It's so hard t know for certain how the future might have unfolded otherwise."

"A full three-quarters of the women I interviewed face-to-face admitted they's wanted a daughter during their first pregnancies, usually as a means of reproducing the mother-daughter bond they'd lost."

"Childbirth marks the instantaneous transition from being a woman with neither mother nor child to being a mother with a child."

"Women with a history of mother loss ... may need extra support throughout labor and delivery if sadness, fear, and grief episodes come and go ... In some motherless daughters, labor and delivery can also unlock fears of dying as their mothers did, and of leaving their helpless children motherless."

"This seemed to be an especially difficult moment for women who had relished the attention lavished upon them during pregnancy ... may have been the first tome since childhood ... that anyone cared so much about what they ate, how well they slept, and their overall level of comfort and contentment ... acknowledge how disconcerting it was at first, indicating that women who are already sensitive to being left behind may be vulnerable to slight feelings of abandonment at this time."

"For motherless women, the most critical aspect of birth doulas is they exist to take care of you ... For the duration of a woman's labor, they'll mother her, which, depending on her willingness to be mothered, can help her traverse the emotional bridge to motherhood in sync with the physical journey."